Forums » Games » New Game: omgaliens

My first Impact game, a 2D space shooter:

omgaliens

It's pretty basic, should take about 5 minutes to play through. I have plans for further enemies / weapons / etc but I wanted to get it out there for some feedback. Took maybe 50 hours from start to finish (including learning Impact, making the sound effects and graphics, tweaking, etc)

Thanks for reading!

Great work! Nice badguys, I love their movement and the amount of bullets to dodge progresses nicely!

Crashes Safari 5 just before it starts playing any audio :( Works great in Chrome though!

I wish there were more baddies with a bit less bullets flying at me.

Thanks guys!

Re: Safari 5 - thanks for the heads up, it crashes for me too. Not sure how to fix that one... I guess I can try checking for Safari and disabling sound on it for now, but that's not a great experience.

I gotta be honest: this bug is disappointing. That brings the number of major platforms that Impact runs well on to about zero. I hope it's my code and not Impact, but given that the bugs are different in each browser, I'm inclined to think it isn't.

Chrome - Sounds play probably 75% of the time (eg: 3 out of 4 shots will make a noise)

Firefox - Intermittent, random frame skips.

Safari - Just doesn't work.

If anyone has ideas for those, I'm all ears.

Re: baddies to bullets ratio - This game suffers a bit from the "I played it a ton while I was making it so my idea of easy/hard is not accurate" :P

Did some digging around:

Chrome - Turns out sound in general is a bit buggy: http://impactjs.com/forums/impact-engine/sound-stops-working

Firefox - No one else has mentioned issues with FF4, so I'm inclined to believe it's probably one of my add-ons, or maybe FF4 on the Mac isn't as good, or maybe my code is doing something that other browsers are optimizing but FF doesn't.

Safari - No fix yet.

I agree on the sound headaches, I had so many performance differences and lag that I've ended up making sound-free versions of my games due to people complaining about the problems caused by them. Pre-loading of my sound files was also causing MacOS/Linux+Chrome to crash on the loading screen as well. Until browsers get better with sound implementation, my only recommendation is to stay light on them.

I think the game's hardness progression is perfect!

Quote from tom
Re: baddies to bullets ratio - This game suffers a bit from the "I played it a ton while I was making it so my idea of easy/hard is not accurate" :P

I think we've all been there. It's just difficult to play from a fresh perspective. A friend of mine once recommended to turn your keyboard upside down and then try to play. It mimics a novice/beginner experience :)

Aside from all the sound woes, great job!

guys, try using SoundManager 2 if you're serious about giving the user a good audio experience

http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/

the latency for this is unparelllallable (even I can't spell it right)

It didn't crash for me on Mac OS X Safari 5.0.4. Pretty fun for this type of game.

Re: SoundManager2

Is SM2's HTML5 Audio support actually any better than Impact's?

From the looks of the site it uses Flash and then degrades to HTML5 if Flash is unavailable, but they call their HTML5 Audio support "beta-ish". Also their demo on their site does not work when I have Flash disabled; which isn't a promising sign. Since I've never used SM2 I have no opinions either way, but for me it's very important to have zero dependancies on Flash.

Re: Safari @stahlmanDesign - That's good, though it still crashes my OS X Safari 5.0.5.

the HTML5 audio support in SM2 is crappy at best.

why zero dependancies on Flash? SM2 works great for browser based HTML5 games. take it as a temp solution before HTML5 gets fixed.

if you're going mobile, HTML5 audio sucks there as well. People are trying to work around it (for eg: Dominic with iOSImpact uses a different tech).

i think if you want to build a game for many, try to make sure the experience is not compromised. i.e do everything possible to get audio and visual to the max.

Re: @fugufish

I can see your point, and it's likely I'll have to make some compromise since my game Audio seems to crash Safari.

Most of my reasons for not wanting to use Flash are ideological, although you covered the practical reasons for not wanting to use Flash which I agree with as well.

I really enjoyed it and I can't wait for the final version.

Just popping in to say that I swapped out Impact's audio for SoundManager2 and it's been working great.

Although it seems that way, it's not quite a drop in replacement. If you want to load all your sounds at the beginning, one thing you can do is create a map/list/array of sounds and have the default SM2 configuration pre-load all sounds. Otherwise SM2 will try to load the sound at .play() [or when the sound object is created, if you configure it that way]. I didn't do that for this game because all the sound files are extremely small and are initialized/loaded before they are played.